MH17 anniversary: Dozens of Australians boarded the Malaysia Airlines flight home, but never returned. Ten years later, their families are still in pain
Grieving families shared their final memories of their loved ones on the anniversary of the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17.
Wednesday marks the 10th anniversary of the plane being shot down over eastern Ukraine en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, killing all 298 people on board, including 38 Australian residents and citizens.
The plane was shot down by a missile while flying over conflict-torn eastern Ukraine, an area then held by pro-Russian separatists.
A joint investigation into the shooting, led by the Netherlands, Australia, Malaysia, Belgium and Ukraine, concluded that the missile system was transported from Russia to an agricultural field near Pervomaiskyi in eastern Ukraine.
It took 10 years for David Horder to speak publicly about the unimaginable loss of his parents Susan and Howard.
A few days earlier, the couple, who had been married for 42 years, had spent a week with David in London, where he was living at the time.
They then traveled to the Netherlands for the final part of their European adventure to attend several André Rieu shows.
Before the couple boarded the ill-fated flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, she headed home to Brisbane.
Mr Horder texted his parents, saying: ‘Have a nice flight… see you soon…’
Susan and Howard (pictured) were on flight MH17 when it was shot down on July 17, 2014
Susan and Howard Horder met their son David (right) a week before the tragedy in Europe
“Dad replied with ‘we’re just going on board… see you at the wedding of the year’ and mom replied with something else,” he said A current case.
Mr Horder thought he would see them later that year at his brother’s wedding in Bali, but he never saw them again.
“I could never have predicted how messy and dark and complicated it would get,” he said.
Mr Horder said he knew “instantly” his parents were on the plane as soon as he read the news alerts on his phone.
“I would be lying if I said I still have hope,” he told the program.
‘I turned on the TV and saw this dark plume of smoke.
‘The world changed completely.’
According to Mr Horder, there were tears, confusion and questions, and an unlikely friendship developed with a detective who supported him through what he described as a “huge, complicated haze”.
Jack O’Brien almost missed his flight, and his parents still wish he had
Jack O’Brien’s parents, Meryn and Jon, were happy to see their son again, who had been backpacking around Europe for seven weeks.
The 25-year-old man from western Sydney ran like crazy through Schiphol, looking for his flight that was delayed by 13 minutes.
Ten years later, his family is still haunted by the thought that their son would still be alive if he had never boarded flight MH17.
Mr O’Brien remembers turning on the radio while making a cup of tea and hearing the shocking news that a Malaysia Airlines plane had crashed with no survivors.
He and his wife Meryn shared their story in a new five-part podcast from the Australian Federal Police, called Search Among the Sunflowers, released this week.
“I think my first reaction was, ‘That’s Jack’s plane,’” Mr. O’Brien recalled.
‘And I didn’t know that Meryn had the radio on in the bedroom and heard the same thing.
“That was basically the end of our lives as we knew them.”
Jack (pictured in Paris) toured Europe for seven weeks before his life was cut short
The couple have watched CCTV footage of their son’s final moments and said it was “probably one of the most poignant and painful things” to realise how close he came to missing the plane.
“The last shot was of that gangway. There was no line because everyone was already on board. There was just that empty gangway with Jack behind him running along the stage to get on the plane,” Ms. O’Brien said.
“I was just thinking, ‘Why didn’t you fall? Why didn’t you break your leg or something?'”
‘I mean, if we had gotten a phone call from Amsterdam saying, ‘I broke my leg,’ we would have thought, ‘Oh, that’s terrible.’ You know?
“But now that I know what happened, I think: this is terrible.”
In November 2022, the court in The Hague ruled that Russian military and intelligence officers Igor Vsevolodovich Girkin and Sergey Nikolayevich Dubinskiy and pro-Russian Ukrainian Leonid Volodymyrovych Kharchenko were guilty of shooting down the plane.
The Hague sentenced the men to life imprisonment, but the EU has no extradition treaty with Russia and the men are still at large. They are believed to be in Russia.
A fourth man, Russian Oleg Pulatov, was acquitted of all charges.
The podcast is available on the AFP website.
The ill-fated plane was shot down over eastern Ukraine by ‘a rebel missile’
